Bringing affective behaviour to presentation agents

Interface agents are more and more often leaving laboratories to be used as commercial products. We can see them presenting news on the Internet or as tour guides in 3D worlds. These agents present a new opportunity for authors to create a new kind of presentation which is more attractive and interactive. However, as many interface agent systems are now available, controlling them needs advanced knowledge of programming languages such as JavaScript or Visual Basic Script. Our motivation is to provide classical authors with a powerful but easy-to-use language to control interface agents: the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language (MPML). Our main focus is to provide emotional control of the agents to make the communication with the user even more natural.